I Got My Sister’s Wedding Invitation in the Mail
The “zoom out” moments are upon us
If you know me at all, you know that I adore author Eli Rallo. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve recommended her book to, and I constantly find myself screenshotting what she writes on social media because she has such a way with words that to paraphrase her wisdom would be a crime. One example is a recent video of hers, where she said, “How you spend your life is how you live your life.” She goes on to explain that spending your life miserable means you will have a miserable life, spending your life joyful will mean you will have a joyful life, etc. This concept seems obvious, but she’s not just referring to attitude or abstract emotions. Literally: what you spend your time doing each day is how you live your life; there is no separate life you get to live other than the one that makes up each individual moment. As my friends, family, and I all seem to be in chapters of life right now that just scream, “CHANGE!” this reminder has been important.
When I think about my life, I picture two timelines, marked up like rulers. On one of them, I am zoomed in enough to see the individual centimeter and millimeter marks. On the other one, those spaces in between the inches are larger; there are gaps. The former is my everyday. The latter is my life from a bird’s eye view. Of course, as Eli describes, these timelines are happening concurrently. When I opened my mailbox the other day, I was promptly reminded of this.
There, staring up at me with swooping letters and a delicate seal, was my sister’s wedding invitation.
I knew I’d be getting it any day now. In fact, my sister had been reminding me for a few days to check my mail because she was trying to gauge how long they were taking to be delivered. So it’s not that this was some defining, emotional moment; it was actually the opposite. I grabbed it, along with the various magazines and car dealership postcard ads that always seem to make their way into the pile, and went right on about my day. Between making dinner and starting homework, I snapped a photo of the envelope and sent it to my sister.
WOOOOO! I sent alongside it.
And… that was it. My day went on. The invitation got tucked aside for me to officially RSVP to later. Beyond the jokes with my sister about it (Whaddya know, I’m free that day! I’ll be there!), there was nothing consequential about the moment.
Get home, throw laundry in, retrieve my sister’s wedding invitation, make dinner, do homework, go to bed.
Millimeter lines in my centimeter day.
The next day, I was catching up with a friend. “Oh yeah, my sister’s wedding invitation came yesterday,” I threw in.
Her eyes got wide. “Oh my GOD. That’s insane!”
And, I mean, it was, wasn’t it? She was right. This is my sister’s wedding invitation. Because she is getting married. That is not a millimeter moment. That is not a centimeter event. Eli Rallo’s words came back to me. How you spend your life is how you live your life.
I thought about all of my friends sending me photos of their graduation dresses, updating me about what day they are getting them tailored and when they are planning to take their photos adorned in all their regalia. These big life moments are put into motion over the course of our everyday; they become these millimeter checkpoints no different from the other tasks on our to-do list. It can be easy to forget that that other timeline exists—the one where all we have are those larger, inch-wide tally marks, and that the moments that pepper the spaces between them will be these milestone events.
How you spend your life is how you live your life.
Several months ago, I was with someone I grew up with but hadn’t seen in a while. Our siblings are around the same age, and our families have always known each other, so over the years we’d bonded over understanding sibling age gaps and the sometimes-odd, different stages of life that can be happening all at once as a result of those family dynamics. Sitting across the room from each other, in a college town far removed from our small hometown, he revealed that his brother was going to be getting engaged soon.
“It’s definitely weird,” he said slowly. His eyes seemed far away, contemplating. “Was it weird when your brother got engaged?”
I thought about it for a minute before answering. My brother, now married for several years, got engaged when I was in high school.
“It was weird, but I was so much younger that I don’t think it quite felt real. My sister getting engaged, though, practically sent me into an existential crisis.”
He cocked his head and laughed. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I think it was just different. My brother got engaged pretty young, and again, I was really young, so I don’t think it really sunk in. I’d known the engagement was coming for my sister, and I was older, so it felt… major.”
At the time of this conversation, we were still many months away from my sister’s wedding. There were no invitations printed with my name or wax seals waiting to be broken. I’d had more distance from the event to see it; I was zoomed out, looking at that timeline with the inch marks.
Now, fast forward several months, and I’m zoomed in again, looking at my everyday, consumed by the millimeters and centimeters. The Big Moments feel interspersed with the Little Moments. In some ways, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes being so wrapped up in the magnitude of these events can become paralyzing for being able to enjoy them—picking the right font for an invitation can become daunting; selecting the perfect graduation dress can become impossible; creating an inimitable version of the event, whatever it is, becomes obsessive. In that sense, taking these milestone events off of their pedestals, mixing them in with our millimeter moments in our centimeter days, can be helpful for putting them in perspective. On the other hand, we risk not zooming out enough when we do so.
Like me when my sister’s wedding invitation came in the mail. I was so dialed into the everyday-ness of what makes up these life events that I had slacked off on taking a moment here and there to relish in the fact that these are the “zoom out” moments. These are the moments that permeate a bird’s eye view of our lives, the ones that fill in those gaps when the millimeter moments of the centimeter days fade into inch-wide tallies marked only with memories.
Get home, throw laundry in, retrieve my sister’s wedding invitation, make dinner, do homework, go to bed.
Meet a friend for coffee, go to class, try on a graduation dress, return a package, wash dishes.
Finish up assignments, respond to an email, start packing up my room, go to my official last day of school, pay a bill.
How you spend your life is how you live your life.
A lot of the time, especially with social media, we are reminded of the importance of staying present in each individual moment. This is an important practice. But it is an equally important practice to take a breather and realize that we are actively living in the bird’s eye view moments of our lives. Often, they are mixed in with the everyday tasks, so we forget that they have something extra to them—but they do.
Getting my sister’s wedding invitation in the mail was part of an everyday moment, but the existence of my sister’s wedding invitation will find its place on that zoomed out timeline of memories. The same is true for a lot of people I know right now, whether it's moving, starting new jobs, or graduating college.
If the next few months are filled with as many of these Big Life Events™ for you as they are for me, I hope that you can enjoy them—that, even when you are in the millimeter moments of the centimeter days, you remember that you are also filling in the gaps of the inch-wide spaces that will appear in your memory once you’ve had distance from this chapter of life.
Because, as Eli Rallo reminds us: how you spend your life is how you live your life.